Category: Distance Education

Many of the sites I’ve been involved with over they years have gracefully (and some not so gracefully) atrophied away – usually through lack of posting/input or contribution. Even my latest project – The Canadian Institute for Distance EDucation Research (CIDER site) seems to be barely sustining life and has yet to attain critical mass for robust knowledge construction.

At Alt-C conference last month I heard that this is far from a rare fate for many sites. Someone referred to the occaisional user as a “tumbelweed blowing through a ghost town”. I know from my youth on the Canadian prairies that barbed wire fences can (and do) catch tumbelweeds, but it seems a rather harsh restraint mechanism -even for teachers! Our challenge is to catch those tumbelweeds and use their energy to kindle or rekindle community.

Of course the easiest slutions are technical ones. I was very impressed by the new “leMill” learning object repository site. This Plone based application (released as Open Source under GNU GPL license) goes beyond earlier first generation learning object repositories by adding community features such as profiles (to find like minds), indiviudal blogs, groups for collaborative blogs and means to create and comment upon new “activities” created and supported using the leMill resources. LeMill seems to do for repositories what ELGG does for profiles.

Although it is very early times for leMill, I note that many of the groups lack even a single blog entry. Obviously, one can build it and but you cannot expect that they will come!Read More

Dave Cormier from the University of PEI, invited me to record EDTechTalk #60 last Sunday. Dave and his colleague Jeff Lebow have been recording chats with assorted EdTech types for over a year. The chats tend to get a bit ‘far reaching’ and slightly off topic, and I think mine was no exception. A loyal band of 5-10 life audience members joined via SKYPE and text chat window, to contribute their questions/comments.

I probably tended to talk too much about my own history and in too little detail on some of the ‘big issues’ but it was Sunday evening in the summer, and I enjoyed the chat.
Thanks Dave and those who sat in. The MP3 recording of our conversation is available here.

Terry

In this post I relate my experiences exploring LindenLab’s SecondLife with a view to assessing their use in formal educational contexts.

I’ve long been interested in the use of the net to support both formal and informal learning and especially in those contexts where F2F meeting is impossible or severely restricted. Thus, I’ve played with most of the early technologies that provided first for text and later multimedia forms of both synchronous and asynchronous technologies. From both my research and personal observations, learning is enhanced when participants are afforded the opportunity and provided incentives to create a kind of community, that can be relied upon for support, motivation, insight and fun.

Proponents of these virtual environments argue that they afford the creation of vibrant forms of communities of inquiry. Key to many commonplace and dictionary definitions of community is a sense of place. Describing, creating and experiencing a sense of place on the net has been the domain of science fiction authors (notably Gibson and Stephenson) and early developers of text (Moos and Muds), 2D animation (http://www.thepalace.com) and real time videoconferencing. Although each of these developments have attracted experimental educational use (for example Moo’s Athena University, many university Palaces etc.) none have thrived to the extent where they are the home or even attracted major use by mainline or emergent formal educational institutions.

This may however be changing as affordances of the net expand to include broadband connection, end users machines powerful enough to render complex, realtime audio and graphic displays and user experience with and expectation of high quality immersive experiences. The question that remains unresolved is how important both real time interaction is and if that interaction (and resulting learning) is significantly enhanced by a sense of shared presence.

With this background, I set out this weekend to explore what I believe to be the largest and most fully functional of these places – ‘Second Life”

SecondLife

SecondLife went online in 2002 as a publicly accessible, virtual world owned and operated by Linden Labs. Secondlife (SL) membership in Jan, 2005 was approximately 23,000 living on 14.6 square miles of virtual land (McKeon & Wyche, 2006.) Second life requires the (free) download of a client (Windows, Linux or Mac) application. This proceeded without incidence and installed easily on my Toshiba tablet PC.

The first think I observed was that SL client takes a lot of power. I noticed that it regularly consumed over 90% of the cycles available on my machine, used nearly 12 as much internal memory as Microsoft Word. Bandwidth requirements also seemed high especially when teleporting (10 second delay) but proceeded quite smoothly with few delays as I walked through the site. Given these requirements, I learned to reduce the number of applications I had opened before running SL client to avoid contention and possible crashes.

Each member of SL adopts and adapts the form of an avatar that can be customized to a very high degree creating what you look (or wished you looked) like. The avatar forms can be nonhuman, but most everyone I encountered this past weekend, was shapely and provocatively presented and attired as a 20 something human. One begins the experience by choosing an avatar that one then customizes and clothes. As you see in figure one, none of the avatars available looked even remotely like the slightly overweight 55 year old college professor that I glimpse in the mirror these days. But I did pick a male figure and reduced ‘my’ burgeoning biceps, cut ‘my’ hair and altered the tuxedo to look like a pair of cutoffs and t-shirt, which seemed to match my midsummer mode.

Of course, as a ‘real man’, I didn’t read any of the directions and thus spent some time figuring out to sit, run and even fly. I also spent a few embarrassing moments walking underwater observing the underside of the wharf that I had just walked off! But using the arrow keys and right and left mouse clicks, gave me a sense of simple navigation competence within about 45 minutes. Orientation can be a problem (especially with the capacity to teleport), but either of two maps can be displayed that indicate one’s position and field of view in GPS style.

I did see other players walking about and engaged in a bit of text chat. The first person I really chatted with ended up giving me some new clothes to wear and answered some of my newbie questions. I probably should have taken one of the guided tours of SL or tried to hook up with a guide, but I also wanted to experience the learning curve without ‘hand holding’.

There are much more detailed descriptions of the features of SL elsewhere (see for example McKeon and Wiche 2006 Life Across Boundaries: Design, Identity, and Gender in SL) but I’ll list some that seem especially useful for an educational context:

– SL is scaleable, as a single computer manages a small area on the grid, supporting interaction of the occupants on that one small subset of the environment

– Users or groups of users can buy land and create and furnish their own structures

– Forms of intellectual property (codes and scripts that create everything from sailboats, to artworks, furniture and gambling machines) are owned by individuals and may be sold, bartered, customized

– Commercial exchange is supported through the use of Linden dollars $L that currently trade at about 250 to the American dollar

– Basic membership is free, but if you wish to buy land ($5- $200 US month) and receive weekly stipend (welfare??) of L$1000 a month you need a $9.95 US /month premium account.

– Users can fill out a profile where they can share details of their ‘real’ life or other personal information if they wish

– SL integrates with the WWW in the sense that one can display web pages on bulletin boards, link out to the web, read email etc.

SL features an excellent ‘find’ feature that allows you to find individuals, groups, popular sites and special current events – yard sales and dance parties seem especially popular. Many of these sites are marked “mature” and a visit to one of my first ‘parties’ found a women shouting (both in text and audio) F*** this and F** that over and over, so I wasn’t overly impressed. There was also a number of trivia and bingo type contests going on, with prizes awarded in $L. I later learned that Linden pays hosts of popular sites providing them with cash to pay dancers and others that bring life to the site.

Education at SL. Using the find feature and keywords ‘university’ and ‘college’ I was able to find and teleport to a number of sites with an education focus. SL has an education division and offer trial use and discounts for educators who want to buy whole islands of their own. :

Penn State has recreated on of their art galleries, but alas the roof is not finished, but I don’t think it rains in SL

University College Dublin, has a more developed campus, but there was nobody around (but it is summer holidays!)

SL itself runs SLCampus: described on their board as

“Most of the Campus: Second Life classes are held right HERE, on this region named “Campus” (easy to remember, eh?). If you look around this region, you’ll see different classes working on various projects on their individual plots of land. Here on Campus we also have a public meeting area, a sandbox for temporary building, a public pictureboard for sharing fun photos, a sculpture garden for relaxing between classes, and a campfire for late-nite fireside chats.”

The SL Campus featured experimental use with proximal voice chatting, but I was a bit reluctant to add more plugs to my installation, so was left with either IM or text chat.

Linden labs also supports an education site, wiki and professional advice for educators plus an extensive series of online forums.

There are also blogs (see Matt Tarber’s “The School of SecondLife) or  Second Life Education Wiki and other community of SL educators about.

Discussion: There are a number of features of a ‘real campus’ that Marilyn Lombardi describes in a recent EduCause article and notes how they are being recreated in virtual contexts. Nonetheless, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see that this environment offers everything that Moos and Muds had with the important affordance to create ones own gestures, buildings and activity scripts. Of course we know that busy students and harried teachers are not usually interested in new hobbies nor programming tasks that eat up time. But the capacity to buy or barter such artifacts opens lots of possibilities.

The capacity to create spaces in which multiple forms of human discourse can flourish, while still retaining access to the Net’s resources is very compelling. I imagine that in a dedicated learning environment, the avatars may more closely resemble their human owners, much as anonymity has not been a big feature of online learning. The very low cost, plus capacity to engage in simulations, discourse, collaborative projects and web quests are features very much in demand by online designers and educators. These well supported in SL. As with many new technologies, some of the features of SL – such as text chat, profiles, private space are provided through other social software applications and learning management systems. Therefore one must have a compelling need to engage simultaneously in order to justify the learning curve and technological requirements of these systems. I imagine that for opening sessions, special guests and other multiple site activities, SL would provide not only excitement but a great deal of dare I say “realism’ that likely justifies the effort.

I smiled when I came across a site selling fireworks (reusable no less) as it brought memories of a pioneering virtual conference I hosted in 1995. The MOO site of that era featured fireworks as well- but they exploded in soundlessly in text! Didn’t quite do it for me!

I was very pleased to discover the April 2006 release of the Croquet Open source virtual environment for education. This seems similar to SL, but an individual or school can install there own instance and thus create a more restricted space. One of the most important aspect of a learning community is the capacity to maintain safe spaces for learning. Physically campus based institutions have created safe spaces within which academic and others sorts of freedom are nutured and protected. Creating an educational environment in close proximity to enterprise focused on sex, rock and roll and gambling, presents a host of moral and ethical concerns. Much as we want the education world to be open and accessible, it should also be a safe and non-threatening space in which learning and scholarship need not compete nor conflict with alternate uses of that space. Perhaps Coquet will allow institutions and learning organizations to create that safe place for learning.

The bandwidth and process requirements of SL will be problematic for many potential users. However, the ongoing deployment of high speed networks coupled with continuing increase in processing power, should make these tools more accessible as time goes by. I’m looking forward to exploring these environments at greater length this fall in my Athabasca University Masters of Distance Education course next term

All in all, I enjoyed my time in my Second Life, and didn’t really mind the time away from my first life- but then it is summer!

Afterthought: Being landlocked, some distance from my boat, I was also interested in how SLers sail. I visited a few marina’s, saw some nice racing dingies and a few more classic creations including ones that floated in the air!. Alas, I didn’t have a chance to talk to any sailors, but did watch a race and read the invitation to sign up as a crew member – which I may do!

Me, checking out the boats

Attrition rates are a concern in all forms of education and have been especially problematic for some forms of online learning and distance education. When cohort groups work together through a course of studies, completion rates are very similar to those experienced with face-to-face cohorts. But when learners are allowed increased freedom to enroll whenever they want and to pace their own study, attrition rates are typically considerably higher (Anderson & Wark, 2004). In our ongoing work to enhance online learning, while retaining self pacing and continuous enrollment, we have been using a variety of social software interventions.

In this post I examine the literature on the type of community that can be created in this self-paced context. The literature on collaborative and cooperative learning and most of that on online communities assumes that the learners are working in institutionally established cohort groups. The literature on independent study models was built up in an era when learner-learner interaction was non existent and learner-teacher interaction limited by postal speeds. Thus, the contribution of this literature to Net-infused, self-paced educational models is limited. In looking for new models and ideas, I stumbled upon he idea of affinity groups. Affinity groups have been popularized in informal learning, sports groups and gaming communities may be a closer match and inspiration for developing, supporting and consequently measuring the impact of social support in this unique educational context.

In this post I argue that an online affinity group provides a useful model that we can use and support to increase participation in and successful completion of self-paced, formal online courses.

What is an Affinity Group?

Affinity is defined by Webster “as a sympathy marked by community of interest”. Obviously learners enroled in a course share a community of interest- that being successful completion of that course. But what is often lacking in self-paced learning is a mechanism to explore and develop that “sympathy” with others.

Ironically, the term ‘affinity group’ seems to be used by two very ideologically disparate camps. Marketers talk about developing affinity groups to support a product after its purchase and helping insure repeat business by the customer. Marketers also refer to ‘affinity cards’ that allow users to direct funds earned through their purchases to particular causes, alma maters or other organizations that they support. At the opposite end of the political spectrum activist and anarchistic groups refer to affinity groups as the means by which multiple forms of “action” can evolve in a trusted environment. Luke Hauser contends that “Affinity groups serve as a source of support and solidarity for their members. Feelings of being isolated or alienated from the movement, or the crowd, or the world in general can be alleviated through the love and trust which develops when an affinity group works, plays, and relates together over a period of time. By generating familiarty and trust, the AG structure reduces the possibility of infiltration by outside provocateurs.”

Affinity groups in an online gaming context were described by James Gee (Gee, 2003) as having six characteristics.

Common endeavor. Members of affinity groups do not converse or gather together for the joy of socialization, but rather they share interest and expectation to be working cooperatively on a common task. In education, these tasks can be as large and formal as collaborative projects or as informal as reviewing together in order to improve understanding and subsequent test results. This expectation means that learning designers need to create meaningful activities that learners will perceive as warranting the expenditure of their precious and limited resource of time. These endeavors should be directly related to important learning outcomes. Many educators find that for some students allocating marks is essential to provide external motivation to engage in these activities. However, compulsory participation can lead to assessing the amount of participation in the activity, rather than the amount of learning achieved.

Whole process. Gee warns that the affinity group should not be a short term learning activity such as brainstorming group. Rather affinity groups should be allowed to flow across tasks, activities and structures of the complete learning experience. In online terms, this means that contributions to the group should be persistent and not be destroyed when the course ends. In addition the affinity group should be allowed to configure itself across multiple learning tasks and not have its function or organization model constrained or dictated to by educators.

Extensive orientation. Gee’s 3^rd characteristic builds upon the second and focuses on the capacity for learners to allow the activities of affinity group to pervade the learning environment. Extensive knowledge is not bonded by teacher expectations. Rather it is allowed to flow out and beyond the confines of the course into the personal and professional lives of the learners.

Intensive knowledge: Besides the breadth of extensive knowledge, Gee notes that affinity groups afford members opportunities to share their individual skills This means that the unique contexts, skills, gifts and reflections of each learner should be accessible to the group, so that they can be utilized in enhancing the individual and cooperative learning process and outcomes.

Tacit and Disbursed. Gee notes that affinity groups are distributed organizations. This fits well with online learning but also resonates with connectivist ideas (Siemens, 2005)that argue that knowledge is as much a function of the network of resources available to the learner as particular facts or concepts stored in their individual brains.

Leaders: Finally, Gee notes that the role of leaders in affinity groups is to design and support the members such that their tacit knowledge becomes explicit and is allowed to grow within the collective space, minds and artifacts of the group. Recognizing, supporting and rewarding these leaders is an unresolved challenge for Net based self-paced learning models.

Affinity groups have been used in face-to-face instruction and often the results are described positively. Teller and Gates (2000) note how undergraduate computer science students are allocated into affinity groups with structured individual and group tasks focused on providing direct experience of discipline based research. They claim that “students develop domain expertise, gain an understanding and appreciation of the research process and its practice, and acquire team, communication, problem-solving, and higher-level thinking skills” through experiences in their affinity groups. Mohanan (2003)also uses affinity groups, that she differentiates from short term “buzzgroups” or tutor groups because the affinity groups are long term and work together outside of class time. She argues that “affinity group discussions provide students the best opportunities to strengthen their skills of academic argumentation as well as oral communication skills.”

Green (2002)argues that we should be taking clues from the affinity groups sponsored by sports groups to stimulate ‘clanning’- the term invented by futurist Kathleen Popcorn to describe the trend to belong “to a group that represents common feelings, causes or ideas” . He argues that the affiliation created within these groups will enhance social presence and lead directly to more successful distance education experiences.

All of the above suggests that “affinity groups’ may play an important role in stimulating social discourse, cohesion, perseverance and positive regard with online learners. But these groups need not be as locked down in time as most online learning cohorts demand and thus may play and even more important role in supporting self-paced learners

Implications of Affinity Groups to Self-Paced learning

The scant literature directly relating to affinity groups in education suggests that affinity groups are both pedagogically useful and generally appreciated by learners. One can easily extrapolate from the volumes of studies related to both classroom and online collaborative and cooperative learning research and can see affinity groups as a subset of this socialized form of learning. Affinity groups may be a very useful organizational model that stimulates social activity and social presence even within self-paced and continuous learning. This form of education has been described as independent study, but I argue that with appropriate technological, social and pedagogical support, self-paced learning need not be independent learning.

One cannot however expect affinity groups to suddenly and spontaneously emerge from education models and systems based upon independent study assumptions. Rather the following organizational interventions are suggested:

Discovery Allow students to discover each other: Affinity cannot grow, supporting new forms of self-paced learning unless learners are able to discover each other. The profile systems built into many social programs such as ELGG are ideal tools, allowing learners to selectively release (and subsequently search for classmates with) details about themselves, their interests and their learning.

Activities: Create meaningful activities for collaborative activities: Traditionally designers of independent study materials have focused on behaviorist models of learning and learning activities that do not require social interventions. To create the raison d’etre for initial affinity group formation designers need to create welcoming and affirming activities that are perceived as meaningful and valued educational activities and that support the creation and maintenance of affinity groups.

Leadership Provide opportunities and invitation for learners to develop and express their leadership potential. Learning is inherently a growth experience and one of the most valuable learning is that related to developing and growing one’s leadership abilities. Leading in a group with whom one has never met physically is challenging, but the abundance of on-line communities extant on the Net illustrates that it is quite possible. Learners need to be both encouraged and empowered to extend themselves by designing, leading and explicating knowledge constructed within the affinity groups.

Research and measure: Formal learning in any environment is complicated and those forms that are distributed and away from the eye of the researcher or teacher are even more obfuscated. The number of ways that affinity groups can be created (presage variables), the activities they can engage in (process activities) and the variety of outcomes (products) is large ((Biggs, 1989). Only through systematic investigation of these variables using a variety of methodologies will we begin to find proven ways to create, sustain and benefit from affinity groups in self-paced, networked learning..

Reference List

Anderson, T., & Wark, N. (2004). Why do teachers get to learn the most? A case study of a course based on student creation of learning objects. e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology, 7(2)
Retrieved Nov. 2004 from http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol7_no2/FullPapers/WhyDoTeachers.pdf

Biggs, J.B. (1989). Approaches to the enhancement of tertiary teaching. Higher Education Research and Development, 8 , 7-25.

Gee, J. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Green, J. (2002). Exemplars of on-line peer support: are we looking in the right places? In Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia: Perth: Retrieved Feb. 2006 from http://www.ecu.edu.au/conferences/herdsa/main/papers/ref/pdf/Green.pdf.

Mohanan, T. (2003). Affinity Groups: The Idea and Its Potential. Ideas on Teaching., 1, 14-15.
Retrieved Feb. 2006 from http://www.cdtl.nus.edu.sg/Ideas/iot26.htm

Siemens, G. (2005). A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. Instructional Technology and Distance Education, 2(1), 3-10.
Retrieved Oct. 2005 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

Teller P.,& Gates, A. (2000). Applying The Affinity Research Group Model To Computer Science Research. In 30th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference: IEEE. Retrieved Feb. 2006 from pitt.edu/fie2000/papers/1100.pdf.